


the troubles of my own skin

by consultingwives (westminsterabi)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drunk Sherlock, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pining, Pining Sherlock, Pre-Reichenbach, Sad Sherlock, Sherlock-centric, Virgin Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 15:10:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7719574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westminsterabi/pseuds/consultingwives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>john doesn't know that sherlock keeps a bottle of nasty cheap liquor in his room. <br/>actually, there are a lot of things that john doesn't know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the troubles of my own skin

**Author's Note:**

> title from patrick stump's song "everybody wants somebody"

John doesn’t know that there’s a bottle of cheap vodka hidden in my dresser. Nor does he know that every evening he works late at the surgery I unscrew the plastic cap on the bottle of Svedka and take one shot that burns while it goes down. It always leaves the acrid taste of cheap, cheap liquor in my throat. Sometimes if I feel indulgent I mix it with the orange juice (Tesco’s brand) that John keeps in the fridge.

 

Then I sit down and I watch crap telly until I fall asleep. Every time someone makes a spectacular display of ignorance, I take a shot. The criteria for that can change, depending on how pissed I plan on getting. Once I almost texted John until my rational brain got the better of me.

 

Here’s what the text said:

 

“I don’t know how long I’ve loved you.”

 

After that happened I make sure that my phone is always somewhere out of reach when I start watching Celebrity Big Brother, because inevitably someone on the show reminds me of John, or me, or me and John. I honestly have no idea how he would react to receiving a text like that. I try and hide these things, and by my own estimation I think I’ve done a pretty good job. What would he possibly think? A joke, perhaps. For a case, maybe.

 

Or maybe he’d believe it.

 

I don’t know how long, by the way. I’ve never been in love, not this way, before John. I went along in my silly little life, solving cases and occasionally fawning over the dumbest objects of affection. You can’t control a crush; only how you react to one.

 

I had a crush on him, from the moment he sauntered into that room at Bart’s with his big-dick walk and his limp and his haircut and it was like he’d punched me in the face the moment he called me “brilliant”. It was still a crush, a little fluttering in my heart when he walked into a room and the way that I checked my phone every five minutes to see if he’d texted me back. A crush is the way that it feels as if someone has a fist around your heart and gives it a little squeeze every time you see or think about the person, at least in my experience. (Unfortunately there’s no way to gather objective empirical data. Although I could just ask people. As if I would ever.)

 

There was one day, I don’t remember exactly when. We were on a case and he bent over a dead body and starting giving cause of death and I was looking at his arse and thinking about how brilliant he is, how he has expertise that I never will, how he is his own kind of clever and I never want to let him go. And that’s when it occurred to me that this is what love feels like. Where is that line, between a squashy, soppy feeling in your gut and what they call love?

 

Perhaps I draw the line at thinking that he is flawless.

 

If I had sent him that text and he had believed it I don’t know what he would have done then. Moved out, maybe. Told me it wouldn’t change things, but then he would look over his shoulder a few times a day to see if I was checking him out, and look at my face with that pitying look that people give to other people whom they know love them. Maybe he’d have told other people, it’d have gotten out to Scotland Yard and Anderson would have laughed and Sally would have laughed and they’d have asked me how I could possibly know what love is like, being a sociopath and all.

 

John is straight and the third option was never an option.  

 

This isn’t where my head goes when the contestants on Big Brother have been particularly bad and I’m feeling particularly reckless. This is where my head goes when I’m mostly sober, feeling self-pitying. When I’m actually drunk, off my tits drunk, (look, if I can’t have cocaine this is something at least), things are simultaneously better and worse.

 

Things are better because my data-processing skills are severely compromised and I don’t have to torture myself with all the different ways that John could feel about me, every single one of them platonic and ranging from bare tolerance to heterosexual life partner material. (None of them match the way that I feel about him.)

 

Things are better because I don’t have that horrid blank space between when I put my mind to falling asleep and when it actually happens. I can’t spend that time suspended in black limbo where all kinds of distortions of John can come to my brain and each one of them can say things that hurt me more than anything the real John has yet said. (And yet every one of them is a possibility, and real John saying it would hurt a thousand times more than an imaginary John doing so.) I slip effortlessly, easily into the void, sometimes with a quick wank to push me along.

 

Things are worse, though, too. They’re worse because with my senses dulled and without any input and with me alone with myself in the flat I’m stuck with only my own brain chewing on the fact that John cannot and will not ever love me back. The analytic part doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is that he can’t, he won’t. That he has dated five women, to wit, since we’ve lived together, and zero men. That I tried telling him I wanted to date him, in the most idiotic of all ways and that he turned me down as if it were nothing. As if I hadn’t just shown everything. (Although it was less of a soul back then, back when it was just a tiny crush, and not this weight on my chest that never seems to go away.)

 

Things are worse because the thoughts I know to keep caged up when my judgement has the better of me are free to bubble to the surface.

 

_He’d be disgusted. He’d move out. He’d never talk to you again. He’d block your number from his phone, you’d never hear from him again. He’d move to Manchester. He’d be gone, out of your life. Gone forever._

That’s where my brain goes when I’ve really had too much, when I’m staring at a brand new bottle from the liquor store on the corner and wondering how it got to be a quarter empty and shouldn’t I be dead of alcohol poisoning if that really was me? I think about John, and the things he might say if he knew that I dream about waking up next to him, and that sometimes, when my subconscious is really having a laugh, we’re together, and he proposes, and we have wonderful, satisfying sex.

 

I think about the things he might say if he knew that since we met, every single time I wake up with a wet, milky stain on my sheets, he’s been the culprit, and not (perhaps more embarrassingly) the previous main offender.   


(Anderson Cooper.)

 

When I’m drunk I consider actually telling him these things until the possible consequences catch up to my addled brain, drunk on cheap vodka and spoiled on bad television. I remember how he reacted to the date thing, just weeks after we’d met, and how betrayed he would probably feel if he knew that it was a real question, a real request, and that I’d been harbouring all of this for months. I think about the things he could do, how the most likely punishment is the one that I could not possibly tolerate.

 

Maybe I draw the line because I know that if I ever tried living without him it wouldn’t work.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this was my first time writing anything besides femlock so i really appreciate comments on how i could improve characterizations! thank you so much for reading :)


End file.
